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All Rise...

Judge Mike Pinsky may have been able to stomach this movie if Kate Winslet hadn't been playing a character named Bitsey.

The Charge

"Hate's no fun if you keep it to yourself."—Bitsey Bloom
(Kate Winslet)

The Case

What happened to Kevin Spacey? Back in his early days on the b-list, Spacey
was a hard working actor who excelled at characters with baby faces and dark
hearts. From Mel Profitt on Wiseguy to Verbal Kint in The Usual Suspects to John Doe in
Se7en, he earned every shiver from the
audience and accolade from the critics.

But then Spacey made the a-list and began to let sentiment guide his roles,
playing for immediate audience reaction rather than exploring the real depths of
the characters. Pay It Forward. K-PAX.. Spacey as the good guy
always never seemed as effective as Spacey as the bad guy.

And now, there is The Life of David Gale. Spacey's Gale might seem a
dark character for all of two minutes: a former death-penalty abolitionist now
on death row for the rape-murder of his colleague. However, it quickly becomes
apparent that screenwriter Charles Randolph (a former philosophy professor and
evangelical activist) and director Alan Parker (who already whitewashed the
Civil Rights movement in Mississippi Burning) have concocted an awkward
fusion of Dead Man Walking and
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.
In other words, they have taken a complex and contentious issue and cleaned it
up by making its hero altogether too perfect for the audience. Gale is a
Harvard-educated Rhodes Scholar who can make intellectual opacity simple for his
students (who knew Jacques Lacan could be such fun?), is cute enough to get
seduced by a student, and runs rhetorical circles around his conservative
adversaries. As viewers of Hollywood movies, we are programmed to root for this
white-bread hero, and get all teary-eyed at the thought that such a wondrous
life is about to be wasted by the savages of the Texas judiciary. If Gale were
black or blue-collar, there would be no movie here. Or maybe Gale would have to
have magical powers to elevate him beyond race and class, like in The Green Mile.

But all The Life of David Gale needs is to point out that Gale is a
white intellectual, and the real political problems behind the death penalty get
swept behind the woodpile. Aw, we say, what a waste of genius. He must be
innocent. And so, the "death row drama" begins its course according to
Hollywood rules, as our requisite feisty reporter, who bears the comic-book name
of Bitsey Bloom (Kate Winslet), races against time to save Gale from lethal
injection. And I mean races: the film's climax even comes down to Bitsey running
in silhouette down an empty road as Gale is marched to his execution.

But I was hanging my head in shame long before the movie got to this point.
Yes, I have some serious qualms about the fairness of the death penalty. No,
there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a movie having a political axe to
grind. But The Life of David Gale tries to justify its righteous cause
with cheap melodrama. Courageous New York liberals versus rabid Texas rednecks;
heroic woman versus patronizing misogynists; crusading white hero railroaded by
the system by a lifetime of false accusations. Alan Parker even deleted scenes
from the film (included on this DVD with optional commentary track) that might
make Gale look a little darker and more complex a character.

All the supplements on Universal's DVD release of The Life of David
Gale keep up this pretense that the movie really has something profound to
say, from the self-congratulatory featurettes (9 minutes on the death penalty in
Texas, 17 minutes of fluff about the film's screenplay and actors, and 5 minutes
about Parker's two sons writing the film's music) to the routine commentary
track from Alan Parker. But none of this stuff can diminish the fact that The
Life of David Gale really ends up making this whole subject seem rather
shallow. Gale is too much of a sensitive innocent, Snow White persecuted by
heartless bureaucrats. The plot twists are cheap and undermine the film's
philosophical credibility. In spite of my own feelings about the death penalty
issue, at the end of The Life of David Gale, I felt an overwhelming urge
to strap this movie to a table and administer some punishment myself.